
Author 



Title 



Imprint. 



16 — 17372-2 op< 



w 



JOHN MORLEY 



alph Waldo Emerson 



AN ESSAY 



MACMILLAN AND CO. 
1884 




JOHN MO RLE Y 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 



AN ESSAY 



MACMILLAN AND CO. 

1884 






Gift 
W. L. Shoemaker 
7 $ '06 



E M E E S X. 

A GREAT interpreter of life ought not himself to 
need interpretation, least of all can he need it for 
contemporaries. When time has wrought changes of 
fashion, mental and social, the critic serves a useful 
turn in giving to a poet or a teacher his true place, 
and ia recovering ideas and points of view that are 
wori;h preserving. Interpretation of this kind Emer- 
son cannot require. His hooks are no p)alimpsest, 
' the prophet's holograph, defiled, erased, and covered 
hy a monk's.' What he has written is fresh, legible, 
and ia full conformitv with the manners and the 
diction of the day, and those who are unable to under- 
stand him without gloss and comment are in fact not 
prepared to understand what it is that the original 
has to say. Scarcely any literature is so entirely 
unprofitable as the so-called criticism that overlays a 
pithy text with a windy sermon. For our time at 
least Emerson may best be left to be his own 
expositor. 

Xor is Emerson, either, in the case of those whom 
the world has failed to recognise, and whom therefore 
it is the business of the criric to make known and to 
define. It is too soon to say ia what particular niche 



2 EMERSON. 

among the teachers of the race posterity will place 
him ; enough that in our own generation he has already 
been accepted as one of the wise masters, who, being 
called to high thinking for generous ends, did not 
fall below his vocation, but, steadfastly pursuing the 
pure search for truth, without propounding a system 
or founding a school or cumbering himself overmuch 
about applications, lived the life of the spirit, and 
breathed into other men a strong desire after the right 
governance of the soul. All this is generally realised 
and understood, and men may now be left to find 
their way to the Emersonian doctrine without the 
critic's prompting. Though it is only the other day 
that Emerson walked the earth and was alive and 
among us, he is already one of the privileged few whom 
the reader approaches in the mood of settled respect, 
and whose names have surrounded themselves with an 
atmosphere of religion. 

It is not particularly profitable, again, to seek for 
Emerson one of the labels out of the philosophic 
handbooks. Was he the prince of Transcendentalists, 
or the prince of Idealists 1 Are we to look for the 
sources of his thought in Kant or Jacobi, in Fichte or 
Schelling ? How does he stand towards Parmenides 
and Zeno, the Egotheism of the Sufis, or the position 
of the Megareans ? Shall we put him on the shelf 
with the Stoics or the Mystics, with Quietist, Pan- 
theist, Determinist? If life were long, it might be 
worth while to trace Emerson's affinities with the 
philosophic schools ; to collect and infer his answers 
to the everlasting problems of psychology and meta- 



EMERSON. . o 

physics ; to extract a set of coherent and reasoned 
opinions about knowledge and faculty, experience and 
consciousness, truth and necessity, the absolute and 
the relative. But such inquiries would only take 
us the further away from the essence and vitality 
of Emerson's mind and teaching. In philosophy 
proper Emerson made no contribution of his own, 
but accepted, apparently without much examina- 
tion of the other side, from Coleridge after Kant, 
the intuitive, a priori, and realist theory respect- 
ing the sources of human knowledge, and the ob- 
jects that are within the cognisance of the human 
faculties. This was his starting point, and within its 
own sphere of thought he cannot be said to have 
carried it any further. What he did was to light up 
these doctrines with the rays of ethical and poetic 
imagination. As it has been justly put, though Emer- 
sonian transcendentalism is usually spoken of as a 
philosophy, it is more justly regarded as a gospel.^ 
But before dwelling more on this, let us look into the 
record of his life, of Avhich we may say in all truth 
that no purer, simpler, and more harmonious story can 
be found in the annals of far-shinins: men. 



Kalph Waldo Emerson was born at Boston, May 
25, 1803. He was of an ancient and honourable 

1 Frothiiigham's Transcendentalism in Nciu England: a 
History — a judicious, acute, and highly interesting piece of 
criticism. 



4 EMEESON. 

English stock, who had transplanted themselves, on 
one side from Cheshire and Bedfordshire, and on the 
other from Durham and York, a hundred and seventy 
years before. For seven or eight generations in a 
direct and unbroken line his forefathers had been 
preachers and divines, not without eminence in the 
Puritan tradition of New England. His second name 
came into the family with Kebecca Waldo, Avith whom 
at the end of the seventeenth century one Edward 
Emerson had intermarried, and whose family had fled 
from the Waldensian valleys and that slaughter of 
the saints which Milton called on Heaven to avenge. 
Every tributary, then, that made Emerson what he 
was, flowed not only from Protestantism, but from 
' the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.' When 
we are told that Puritanism inexorably locked up the 
intelligence of its votaries in a dark and straitened 
chamber, it is worthy to be remembered that the 
genial, open, lucid, and most comprehensive mind of 
Emerson was the ripened product of a genealogical tree 
that at every stage of its growth had been vivified by 
Puritan sap. 

Not many years after his birth, Emerson's mother 
was left a widow, with narrow means, and he under- 
Avent the wholesome training of frugality in youth. 
When the time came, he was sent to Harvard. When 
Clough visited America a generation later, the col- 
legiate training does not appear to have struck him 
very favourably. 'They learn French and history 
and German, and a great many more things than in 
England, but only imperfectly.' This Avas said from 



EMEKSON. 5 

the standard of Eugby and Balliol, and the method 
that Clough calls imperfect had merits of its own. 
The pupil lost much in a curriculum that had a cer- 
tain rawness about it, compared with the traditional 
culture that was at that moment (1820) just beginning 
to acquire a fresh hold Avithin the old gray quad- 
rangles of Oxford. On the other hand, the training 
at Harvard struck fewer of those superfluous roots 
in the mind, which are only planted that they may 
be presently cast out again with infinite distraction 
and waste. 

When his schooling was over, Emerson began to 
prepare himself for the ministrations of the pulpit, 
and in 1826 and 1827 he preached in divers places. 
Two years later he was ordained, and undertook the 
charge of an important Unitarian Church in Boston. 
It was not very long before the strain of forms, 
comparatively moderate as it was in the Unitarian 
body, became too heavy to be borne. Emerson found 
that he could no longer accept the usual view of the 
Communion Service, even in its least sacramental in- 
terpretation. To him the rite was purely spiritual in 
origin and intent, and at the best only to be retained 
as a commemoration. The whole world, he said, 
had been full of idols and ordinances and forms, 
when ' the Alniighty God was pleased to qualify and 
send forth a man to teach men that they must serve 
him with the heart ; that only that life was religious 
which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke 
and forms were shadows. This man lived and died 
true to that purpose ; and now with his blessed word 



6 EMERSON. 

and life before us, Christians must contend that it is 
a matter of vital importance, really a duty, to com- 
memorate him by a certain form, whether that form 
be agreeable to their understandings or not. Is not 
this to make vain the gift of God ? Is not this to 
make men forget that not forms but duties — not 
names but righteousness and love — are enjoined 1 ' 

He was willing to continue the service with that 
explanation, and on condition that he should not him- 
self partake of the bread and wine. The congrega- 
tion would fain have kept one whose transparent 
purity of soul had attached more than his heresy had 
alienated. But the innovation Avas too great, and 
Emerson resigned his charge (1832). For some five 
or six years longer he continued occasionally to preach, 
and moi'e than one congregation would have accepted 
him. But doubts on the subject of public prayer began 
to weigh upon his mind. He suspected the practice 
by which one man offered up prayer vicariously and 
collectively for the assembled congregation. Was not 
that too, like the Communion Service, a form that 
tended to deaden the spirit 1 Under the influence of 
this and other scruples he finally ceased to preach 
(1838), and told his friends that henceforth he must 
find his pulpit in the platform of the lecturer. ' I see 
not,' he said, ' why this is not the most flexible of all 
organs of opinion, from its popularity and from its 
newness, permitting you to say what you think, with- 
out any shackles of proscription. The pulpit in our 
age certainly gives forth an obstructed and uncertain 
sound ; and the faith of those in it, if men of genius. 



EMEESON. 7 

may differ so much from that of those under it as to em- 
barrass the conscience of the speaker, because so much 
is attributed to him from the fact of standing there.' 
The lecture was an important discovery, and it has 
had many consequences in American culture. Among 
the more undesirable of them has been (certainly not 
in Emerson's own case) the importation of the pulpit 
accent into subjects where one would be happier with 
out it. 

Earlier in the same year in which he retired from 
his church at Boston, Emerson had lost his young 
wife. Though we may well believe that he bore 
these agitations with self-control, his health suffered, 
and in the spring of 1833 he started for Europe. He 
came to be accused of saying captious things about 
travelling. There are three wants, he said, that can 
never be satisfied : that of the rich who want some- 
thing more ; that of the sick who want something 
different; and that of the traveller who says. Any- 
where but here. Their restlessness, he told his 
countrymen, argued want of character. They Avere 
infatuated with 'the rococo toy of Italy.' As if what 
was true anywhere were not true everywhere ; and as 
if a man, go where he will, can find more beauty or 
worth than he carries. All this was said, as we shall 
see that much else was said by Emerson, by way of 
reaction and protest against instability of soul in the 
people around him. ' Here or nowhere,' said Goethe 
inversely to unstable Europeans yearning vaguely 
westwards, ' here or nowhere is thine America.' To 
the use of travel for its own ends, Emerson was 



8 EMERSON. 

of course as much alive as other people. ' There 
is in every constitution a certain solstice when the 
stars stand still in our inward firmament, and 
when there is required some foreign force, some 
diversion or alteration, to prevent stagnation. And 
as a medical remedy, travel seems one of the best' 
He found it so in 1833. But this and his two other 
voyages to Europe make no Odyssey. When Vol- 
taire was pressed to visit Rome, he declared that he 
would be better pleased with some new and free 
English book than with all the glories of amphi- 
theatre and of arch. Emerson in like manner seems 
to have thought more of the great writers whom he 
saw in Europe than of buildings or of landscapes. 
'Am I,' he said, 'who have hung over their Avorks 
in my chamber at home, not to see these men in 
the flesh, and thank them, and interchange some 
thoughts with them?' The two Englishmen to whom 
<^ he owed most were Coleridge and Wordsworth ; and 
the younger writer, some eight years older than 
himself, in whom his liveliest interest had been 
kindled was Carlyle. He was fortunate enough to 
have converse with all three, and he has told the 
world how these illustrious men in their several 
fashions and degrees impressed him.^ It was Car- 
lyle who struck him most. ' Many a time upon the 
sea, in my homeward voyage, I remembered with 
joy the favoured condition of my lonely philosopher,' 
cherishing visions more than divine ' in his stern and 

^ English Traits, 7-18. Irelaml. 143-52. Froude's Carlyle, 
ii. 355-9. 



EMEESON. 9 

blessed solitude.' So Carlyle, with no less cordiality, 
declares that among the figures that he could recollect 
as visiting his Nithsdale hermitage — ' all like Appari- 
tions now, bringing with them airs from Heaven, or 
the blasts from the other region, there is not one of 
a more undoubtedly suj)ernal character than your- 
self ; so pure and still, with intents so charitable ; 
and then vanishing too so soon into the azure Inane, 
as an Apparition should.' 

In external incident Emerson's life was uneventful. 
Nothing could be simpler, of more perfect unity, or 
more free from disturbing episodes that leave scars on 
men. In 1834 he settled in old Concord, the home 
of his ancestors, then in its third century. ' Concord 
is very bare,' wrote Clough, who made some sojourn 
there in 1852, 'and so is the country in general; it 
is a small sort of village, almost entirely of wood 
houses, painted white, with Venetian blinds, green 
outside, with two white wooden churches. There 
are some American elms of a weeping kind, and 
sycamores, i.e. planes ; but the wood is mostly pine — 
white pine and yellow pine — somewhat scrubby, 
occupying the tops of the low banks, and marshy 
hay-land between, very brown now. A little brook 
runs through to the Concord Eiver.'^ The brook 
flowed across the few acres that were Emerson's first 
modest homestead. ' The whole external appearance 
of the place,' says one who visited him, 'suggests 
old-fashioned comfort and hospitality. Within the 
^ Clough's Life and Letters, i. .185. 



10 EMERSON. 

house the flavour of antiquity is still more noticeable. 
Old pictures look down from the walls ; quaint blue- 
and- white china holds the simple dinner; old furniture 
brings to mind the generations of the past. At the 
I'ight as you enter is Mr. Emerson's library, a large 
square room, plainly furnished, but made pleasant 
by pictures and sunshine. The homely shelves that 
line the walls are well filled with books. There is a 
lack of showy covers or rich bindings, and each 
volume seems to have soberly grown old in constant 
service. Mr. Emerson's study is a quiet room up- 
stairs.' 

Fate did not spare him the strokes of the common 
lot. His first wife died after three short years of 
wedded happiness. He lost a little son, who was the 
light of his eyes. But others were born to him, and 
in all the relations and circumstances of domestic life 
he was one of the best and most beloved of men. He 
long carried in his mind the picture of Carlyle's life 
at Craigenputtock as the ideal for the sage, but his 
own choice was far wiser and happier, ' not wholly 
in the busy world, nor quite beyond it.' 

'Besides my house,' he told Carlyle in 1838, 'I 
have, I believe, 22,000 dollars, whose income in 
ordinary years is six per cent. I have no other 
tithe or glebe except the income of my winter 
lectures, which was last winter 800 dollars. Well, 
with this income, here at home, I am a rich man. 
I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. 
I have food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go 
away from home, I am rich no longer. I never have 



EMEESON. 11 

a dollar to. spend on a fancy. As no wise man, 1 
suppose, ever was rich in the sense of freedom to 
spend, because of the inundation of claims, so neither 
am I, who am not wise. But at home I am rich — 
rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is 
an incarnation of Christianity, —I call her Asia,- — 
and keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism ; my 
mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies, 
whose only exception to her universal preference for 
old things is her son ; my boy, a piece of love and 
sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to 
night ; — these, and three domestic women, who cook 
and sew and run for us, make all my household. 
Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, 
and, as far as regards composition, with the most 
fragmentary result : paragraphs incompressible, each 
sentence an infinitely repellent particle. 

' In summer, with the aid of a neighbour, I manage 
my garden ; and a week ago I set out on the west 
side of my house forty young pine trees to protect 
me or my son from the wind of January. The orna- 
ment of the place is the occasional presence of some 
ten or twelve persons, good and wise, who visit us in 
the course of the year.' 

As time went on he was able to buy himself ' a 
new plaything ' — a piece of woodland, of more than 
forty acres, on the border of a little lake half a mile 
wide or more, called Walden Pond. ' In these May 
days,' he told Carlyle, then passionately struggling 
with his Cromwell, with the slums of Chelsea at his 
back, 'when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut. 



1 2 EMERSON. 

and pine, are in their spring glory, I go thither every 
afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path 
through the thicket, all along the bold shore, and 
open the finest pictures' (1845). 

He loved to write at 'large leisure in noble mornings, 
opened by prayer or by readings of Plato, or whatso- 
ever else is dearest to the Morning Muse.' Yet he 
could not wholly escape the recluse's malady. He 
confesses that he sometimes craves ' that stimulation 
which every capricious, languid, and languescent study 
needs.' Carlyle's potent concentration stirs his 
envy. The work of the garden and the orchard he 
found very fascinating, eating up days and weeks ; 
'nay, a brave scholar should shun it like gambling, 
and take refuge in cities and hotels from these per- 
nicious enchantments.' 

In the doings of his neighbom*hood he bore his 
part; he took a manly interest in civil affairs, and 
was sensible, shrewd, and helpful in matters of 
practical judgment. Pilgrims, sane and insane, the 
beardless and the gray-headed, flocked to his door, 
far beyond the dozen persons good and wise whom 
he had mentioned to Carlyle. ' Uncertain, troubled, 
earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral 
world beheld his intellectual fire as a beacon burning 
on a hill-top, and, climbing the difficult ascent, looked 
forth into the surrounding obscurity more hopefully 
than hitherto ' (Haivthorne). To the most intractable 
of Transcendental bores, worst sj^ecies of the genus, 
he was never impatient, nor denied himself ; nor did 
he ever refuse counsel where the case was not yet 



EMERSON. 13 

beyond hope. Hawthorne was for a time his neigh- 
bour (1842-45). ' It Avas good,' says Hawthorne, 'to 
meet him in the wood-paths, or sometimes in our 
avenue, "\\dth that pure intellectual gleam diffused 
about his presence like the garment of a shining one ; 
and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, 
encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive 
more than he could impart.' 

The most remarkable of all his neighbours was 
Thorean, who for a couple of years lived in a hut which 
he had built for himself on the shore of Walden Pond. 
If he had not written some things with a consider- 
able charm of style, Thoreau might have been wisely 
neglected as one of the crazy. But Emerson was 
struck by the originality of his life, and thought it 
well in time to edit the Avritings of one ' who was bred 
to no profession ; never married ; lived alone ; never 
went to Church ; never voted ; refused to pay a tax to 
the State ; ate no flesh, drank no wine, never knew 
the use of tobacco; had no temptations to fight against, 
no appetites, no passions ; refused all invitations, pre- 
ferred a good Indian to highly cultivated people, and 
said he would rather go to Oregon than to London.' 
The world has room for every type, so that it be not 
actively noxious, and this whimsical egotist may well 
have his place in the catalogue. He was, after all, 
in his life only a compendium, on a scale large enough 
to show their absurdity, of all those unsocial notions 
which Emerson in other manifestations found it needful 
to rebuke. Yet we may agree that many of his para- 
doxes strike home with Socratic force to the heart of 



14 EMEESON. 

a civilisation that wise men know to be too purely 
material, too artificial, and too capriciously diffused. 

Emerson himself was too sane ever to fall into the 
hermit's trap of banishment to the rocks and echoes. 
' Solitude,' he said, ' is impracticable, and society fatal.' 
He steered his way as best he could between these 
two irreconcilable necessities. He had, as we have 
seen, the good sense to make for himself a calling 
which brought him into healthy contact with bodies 
of men, and made it essential that he should have his 
listeners in some degree in his mind, even when they 
were not actually present to the eye. As a preacher, 
Emerson has been described as making a deep impres- 
sion on susceptible hearers of a quiet mind, by 'the calm 
dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical 
effort, and the singular simplicity and directness of 
a manner free from the least trace of dogmatic 
assumption.' 'Not long before,' says this witness, 'I 
had listened to a wonderful sermon by Chalmers, 
whose force and energy, and vehement but rather 
turgid eloquence, carried for the moment all before 
him — his audience becoming like clay in the hands 
of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant 
thoughts and serene self-possession of the young 
Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all 
the rhetorical splendours of Chalmers' {Ireland, 141). 

At the lecturer's desk the same attraction made 
itself still more effectually felt. ' I have heard some 
great speakers and some accomplished orators,' Mr. 
Lowell says, ' but never any that so moved and per- 
suaded men as he. There is a kind of undertone in 



EMEESON. 15 

that rich barytone of his that sweeps our minds from 
their foothold into deep waters with a drift that we 
cannot and would not resist. Search for his eloquence 
in his books and you will perchance miss it, but 
meanwhile you will find that it has kindled all your 
thoughts.' The same effect was felt in its degree 
wherever he went, and he took pains not to miss it. 
He had made a study of his art, and was so skilful . 
in his mastery of it that it seemed as if anybody might 
do all that he did and do it as well — if only a 
hundred failures had not proved the mistake. 

In 1838 Emerson delivered an address in the 
Divinity School of Harvard, which produced a gusty 
shower of articles, sermons, and pamphlets, and raised 
him without will or further act of his to the high 
place of the heresiarch. With admirable singleness of 
mind, he held modestly aloof. 'There is no scholar,' 
he wrote to a friend, ' less willing or less able to be 
a polemic. I could not give account of myself if 
challenged. I delight in telling what I think, but if 
you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am 
the most helpless of men.' The year before, his 
oration on the American Scholar {inf. p. 65.) had 
filled Carlyle with delight. It was the first clear 
utterance, after long decades of years, in which he had 
'heard nothing but infinite jangling and jabbering, 
and inarticulate twittering and screeching.' Then 
Carlyle enjoined on his American friend for rule of life, 
' Grive no ear to any man's praise or censure ; know 
that that is not it ; on the one side is as Heaven, if 
you have strength to keep silent and climb unseen ; 
b 



16 EMERSON. 

yet on the other side, yawning always at one's right 
hand and one's left, is the frightfullest Abyss and 
Pandemonium' (Dec. 8, 1837). Emerson's tempera- 
ment and his whole method made the warning need- 
less, and, as before, while ' vociferous platitude was 
dinning his eai's on all sides,' a whole world of thought 
was 'silently building itself in these calm depths.' 
But what would those two divinities of his, Plato 
and Socrates, have said of a man who ' could not give 
an account of himself if challenged ' 1 Assuredly not 
every one who saith Plato, Plato, is admitted to that 
ideal kingdom. 

It was soon after this that the Dial was projected. 
It had its origin in the Transcendental Club, a little 
knot of speculative students at Boston, who met four or 
five times a year at one another's houses to discuss 
questions mainly theological, from more liberal points 
of view than was at that time common, ' the air then in 
America getting a little too close and stagnant.' The 
Club was first formed in 1836. The Dial appeared in 
1840, and went on for four years at quarterly intervals. 
Emerson was a constant contributor, and for the last 
half of its existence he acted as editor. ' I submitted,' 
he told Carlyle, ' to what seemed a necessity of 
petty literary patriotism — I know not what else to 
call it — and took charge of our thankless little Dial 
here, without subscribers enough to pay even a pub- 
lisher, much less any labourer ; it has no penny for 
editor or contributor, nothing but abuse in the news- 
papers, or, at best, silence ; but it serves as a sort of 
portfolio, to carry about a few poems or sentences 



EMEESON. 17 

which would otherwise be transcribed or circulated, 
and we always are waiting until somebody shall come 
and make it good. But I took it, and it took me and a 
great deal of good time to a small purpose ' (July 1 , 
1842). On the whole one must agree that it was to 
small purpose. Emerson's name has reflected lustre 
on the Dial, but when his contributions are taken 
out, and, say, half a dozen besides, the residuum is in 
the main very poor stuff, and some of it has a droll 
resemblance to the talk between Mrs. Hominy and 
the Literary Ladies and the Honourable Elijah 
Pogram. Margaret Fuller ^ — the Miranda, Zenobia, 
Hypatia, Minerva of her time, and a truly remark- 
able figure in the gallery of wonderful women — 
edited it for two years, and contributed many a vivid, 
dashing, exuberant, ebullient page. Her criticism of 
Goethe, for example, contains no final or valid word, 
but it is fresh, cordial, and frank, and no other prose 
contributor, again saving the one great name, has 
anything to say that is so readable. Nearly all the 
rest is extinct, and the Dial now finds itself far away 
from the sunshine of human interest. 

Li 1841 the first series of Emerson's Essays was pub- 
lished, and three years later the second (printed together 
in vol. ii. of this edition). The Poems were first collected 
in 1847, but the final version was not made until 1876. 
In 1847 Emerson paid his second visit to England, 
and delivered his lectures on Representative Men, col- 
lected and published in 1850. The books are said to 
have had a very slow sale, but the essays and lectures 
published in 1860, with the general title of The Conduct 



18 EMERSON. 

of Life, started with a sale of 2,500 copies, though that 
volume has never been considered by the Emersonian 
adept to contain most of the pure milk of the Word. 
Then came that great event in the history of men 
and institutions, the Civil War. We look with anxiety 
for the part played by the serene thinker when the 
hour had struck for violent and heroic action. Emer- 
son had hitherto been a Free Soiler ; he had opposed 
the extension of slavery ; and he favoured its com- 
pulsory extinction, with compensation on the plan of 
our own policy in the West Indies. He had never 
joined the active Abolitionists, nor did he see ' that 
there was any particular thing for him to do in it then.' 
' Though I sometimes accept a popular call, and preach 
on Temperance or the Abolition of Slaverj^, I am sure 
to feel, before I have done with it, what an intrusion 
it is into another sphere, and so much loss of virtue 
in my own ' {To Carlyle, 1844). But he missed no occa- 
sion of showing that in conviction and aim he was with 
good men. The infiimities of fanatics never hid from 
him either the transcendent purity of their motives or 
the grandeur of their cause. This is ever the test of 
the scholar : whether he allows intellectual fastidious- 
ness to stand between him and the great issues of his 
time. ' Cannot the English,' he cried out to Carlyle, 
' leave cavilling at petty failures and bad manners and 
at the dimce part, and leap to the suggestions and 
finger-pointings of the gods, which, above the under- 
standing, feed the hopes and guide the wills of men ? ' 
These finger-pointings. Emerson did not mistake. He 
spoke up for Garrison. John Bro^vn was several 



EMERSON. 19 

times iu Concord, aud. found a hearty welcome in 
Emerson's house. When Brown made his raid at 
Harper's Ferry, and the crisis became gradually 
sharper, Emerson felt that the time had come, and 
his voice was raised in clear tones. After the sword 
is drawn, it is deeds not words that interest and decide ; 
1)ut whenever the word of the student was needed 
Emerson was ready to give the highest expression to 
all that was best in his countrymen's mood during 
that greatest ordeal of our time. The inward re- 
generation of the individual had ever been the key 
to his teaching, and this teaching had been one of the 
forces that, like central fire in men's minds, nourished 
the heroism of the North in its immortal battle. 

The exaltation of national character produced by 
the Civil War opened new and wider acceptance for 
a great moral and spiritual teacher, and from the 
close of the war until his death in 1882, Emerson's 
ascendancy within his own sphere of action was 
complete, and the public recognition of him universal. 
Of story, there is no more to tell. He pursued 
his old way of reading, meditating, conversing, and 
public lecturing, almost to the end. The afternoon 
of his life was cloudless as the earlier day, and the 
shades of twilight fell in unbroken serenity. In his 
last years there was a partial failure of his memory, 
and more than one pathetic story is told of this 
tranquil and gradual eclipse. But ' to the last, even 
when the events of yesterday were occasionally ob- 
scured, his memory of the remote past was ruiclouded ; 
he would tell about the friends of his early and middle 



20 EMERSON. 

life with unbroken vigour.' So, tended in his home 
by warm filial devotion, and surrounded liy the rever- 
ent kindness of his village neighbours, this wise and 
benign man slowly passed away (April 27, 1882).^ 

11. 

It cannot be truly said that Emerson is one of the 
writers who make their way more easily into our 
minds by virtue of style. That his writing has quality 
and flavour none but a pure pedant would deny. His 
more fervent votaries, however, provoke us with a 
challenge that goes far beyond this. They declare 
that the finish, charm, and beauty of the writing are 
as worthy of remark as the truth and depth of the 
thought. It is even ' unmatchable and radiant,' says 
one. Such exaggerations can have no reference to any 
accepted standard. It would, in truth, have been a 
marvel if Emerson had excelled in the virtues of the 
written page, for most of his published work was 

^ The reader who seeks full information about Emerson's 
life will find it scattered in various volumes : among them are — 

Ralph Waldo Emerson ; by George Willis Cooke (Sampson, 
Low, & Co., 1882) — a very diligent and instructive work. 

R. TV. E. ; by Alexander Ireland (Simpkiu, Marshall, & Co., 
1882), described by Carlyle, and known by others, as ' full 
of energy aud broad sagacity and practicality ; infinitely well 
affected to the man Emerson too,' — and full moreover of tliat 
intellectual enthusiasm which in his Scotch countrymen goes so 
often with their practicalities. 

Emerson, at Home and Abroad ; by Moncure D. Conway 
(Triibner & Co., 1883) : the work of a faithful disciple, who 
knew Emerson well, and lias here recorded many interesting 
anecdotes and traits. 



EMERSON, 21 

originally composed and used for the platform. Every- 
body knows how difterent are the speaker's devices 
for gaining possession of his audience, from the writer's 
means of winning, persuading, and impressing the 
attention of his reader. The key to the difference 
may be that in the speech the personality of the 
orator l^efore our eyes gives of itself that oneness and 
continuity of communication, which the writer has to 
seek in the orderly sequence and array of marshalled 
sentence and well-sustained period. One of the traits 
that every critic notes in Emerson's writing, is that it 
is so abrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so discon- 
tinuous, so inconsecutive. Dislike of a sentence that 
drags made him unconscious of the quality that French 
critics name coulant Everything is thrown in just as 
it comes, and sometimes the pell-mell is enough to 
persuade us that Pope did not exaggerate when he 
said that no one qualification is so likely to make a 
good writer, as the power of rejecting his own 
thoughts. 

His manner as a lecturer, says Dr. Holmes, was 
an illustration of his way of thinking. ' He would 
lose his place just as his mind would drop its thought 
and pick up another, twentieth- cousin or no relation 
at all to it.' The same manner, whether Ave liken it 
to mosaic or to kaleidoscope, marks his writing. It 
makes him hard to follow, oracular, and enigmati- 
cal. ' Can you tell me,' asked one of his neighbour, 
while Emerson was lecturing, ' what connection there 
is between that last sentence and the one that went 
before, and what connection it all has with Plato 1 ' 



22 EI\IEKSON. 

' None, my friend, save in God ! ' This is excellent 
in a seer, but less so in the writer. 

Apart from his difficult staccato, Emerson is not free 
from secondary faults. He uses words that are not only 
odd, but vicious in construction ; he is not always gram- 
matically correct ; he is sometimes oblique, and he is 
often clumsy ; and there is a visible feeling after 
epigrams that do not always come. When people say 
that Emerson's style must be good and admirable 
because it fits his thought, they forget that though it 
is well that a robe should fit, there is still something 
to be said about its cut and fashion. 

No doubt, to borrow Carlyle's expression, ' the 
talent is not the chief question here : the idea — that is 
the chief question.' We do not profess to be of those 
to whom mere style is as dear as it was to Plutarch ; 
of him it was said that he would have made Pompey 
win the battle of Pharsalia, if it could have given a 
better turn to a phrase. It would not be worth while 
to speak of form in a thinker to whom our debt is so 
large for his matter, if there were not so much bad 
literary imitation of Emerson. Dr. Holmes mourn- 
fully admits that 'one who talks like Emerson or like 
Carlyle soon finds himself surrounded by a crowd 
of walking phonographs, who mechanically reproduce 
his mental and oral accents. Emerson was before long 
talking in the midst of a babbling Simonetta of echoes.' 
Inferior writers have copied the tones of the oracle 
without first making sure of the inspiration. They for- 
get that a platitude is not turned into a profundity 
by being dressed up as a conundrum. Pithiness in 



EMERSON. 23 

liim dwindles into tenuity in them ; honest discon- 
tinuity in the master is made an excuse for finical 
incoherencies in the disciples ; the quaint, ingenious, 
and unexpected collocations of the original degenerate 
in the imitators into a trick of unmeaning surprise 
and vapid antithesis ; and his pregnant sententious- 
ness set the fashion of a sententiousness that is not 
fertility but only hydropsy. This curious infection, 
which has spread into divers forms of American litera- 
ture that are far removed from philosophy, would have 
been impossible if the teacher had been as perfect in 
exprposion as he was pure, diligent, and harmonious 
in his thinking. 

Yet, as happens to all fine minds, there came to 
Emerson ways of expression deeply marked with 
character. On every page there is set the strong 
stamp of sincerity, and the attraction of a certain 
artlessness ; the most awkward sentence rings true ; 
and there is often a pure and simple note that touches 
us more than if it were the perfection of elaborated 
melody. The uncouth procession of the periods dis- 
closes the travail of the thought, and that too is a kind 
of eloquence. An honest reader easily forgives the 
rude jolt or unexpected start' when it shows a 
thinker faithfully working bis way along arduous 
and unworn tracks. Even at the roughest, Emerson 
often interjects a delightful cadence. As he says of 
Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand 
firm, place them how or where you will. He criticised 
Swedenborg for being supdrfiuously explanatory, and 
having an exaggerated feeling of the ignorance of men. 



24 EMERSON. 

'Men take truths of this nature,' said Emerson, 'very 
fast ' ; and his own style does no doubt very boldly 
take this capacity for granted in us. In ' choice and 
pith of diction,' again, of which Mr. Lowell speaks, he 
hits the mark with a felicity that is almost his o^vn in 
this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free 
from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual 
dawdling for meditation. Nor in fine does his abrupt- 
ness ever impede a true urbanity. The accent is 
homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing has 
a friendliness, a courtesy, a hospitable humanity, 
which goes nearer to our hearts than either literary 
decoration or rhetorical unction. That modest and 
lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm to his 
companionship breathes in his gravest Avriting, and 
prevents us from finding any page of it cold or hard 
or dry. 

Though Emerson was always urgent for ' the soul 
of the world, clean from all vestige of tradition,' yet 
his work is full of literature. He at least lends no 
support to the comforting fallacy of the indolent, 
that originating power does not go with assimilating 
power. Few thinkers on his level disi^lay such 
breadth of literary reference. Unlike Words- 
worth, Avho was content with a few tattered 
volumes on a kitchen shelf, Emerson worked among 
books. When he was a boy he found a volume of 
Montaigne, and he never forgot the delight and 
wonder in which he lived with it. His library is de- 
scribed as filled with well-selected authors, with curious 
works from the eastern world, with many editions 



EMERSON. 25 

ill both Greek and English of his favourite Plato ; 
while portraits of Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe, 
Dante, looked down upon him from the walls. Pro- 
duce a volume of Plato or of Shakespeare, he says 
somewhere, or ' only remind us of their names,'' and 
instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. That 
is the scholar's speech. Opening a^single essay at 
random, we find in it citations from Montesquieu, 
Schiller, Milton, Herodotus, Shelley, Plutarch, Frank- 
lin, Bacon, Van Helmont, Goethe. So little does 
Emerson lend himself to the idle vanity of seeking 
all the treasures of wisdom in his own head, or ne- 
glecting the hoarded authority of the ages. It is true 
that he held the unholy opinion that a translation is as 
good as the original, or better. Nor need we suppose 
that he knew that pious sensation of the book-lover, 
the feel of a library ; that he had any of the collec- 
tor's amiable foolishness about rare editions; or that 
he nourished festive thoughts of 'that company of 
honest old fellows in their leathern jackets in his 
study,' as comrades in a sober old-world conviviality. 
His books were for spiritual use, like maps and 
charts of the mind of man, and not much for 
'excellence of divertiscment' He had the gift of 
bringing his reading to bear easily upon the tenor 
of his musings, and knew how to use books as an aid 
to thinking, instead of letting them take the edge off 
thought. There was assuredly nothing of the compiler 
or the erudite collegian in him. It is a graver defect 
that he introduces the great names of literature with- 
out regard for true historical perspective in their place. 



26 EMERSON. 

either in relation to one another, or to the special 
phases of social change and shifting time. Still let 
his admirers not forget that Emerson was in his own 
way Scholar no less than Sage. 

A word or two must be said of Emerson's verses. 
He disclaimed, for his own part, any belief that they 
were poems. Enthusiasts, however, have been found 
to declare that Emerson ' moves more constantly than 
any recent poet in the atmosphere of poesy. Since 
Milton and Spenser no man — not even Goethe — has 
equalled Emerson in this trait.' The Problem, accord- 
ing to another, ' is wholly unique, and transcends all 
contemporary verse in grandeur of style.' Such poetry, 
they say, is like Westminster Abbey, 'though the Abbey 
is inferior in boldness.' Yet, strangely enough, while 
Emerson's poetic form is symbolised by the flowing- 
lines of Gothic architecture, it is also ' akin to Doric 
severity.' With all the good will in the world, I do 
not find myself able to rise to these heights ; in fact, 
they rather seem to deserve Wordsworth's descri^jtion, 
as mere obliquities of admiration. 

Taken as a whole, Emerson's poetry is of that kind 
which springs, not from excitement of passion or feel- 
ing, biit from an intellectual demand for intense 
and sublimated expression. We see the step that lifts 
him straight from prose to verse, and that step is the 
shortest possible. The flight is awkward and even 
uncouth, as if nature had intended feet rather than 
wings. It is hard to feel of Emerson, any more than 
Wordsworth could feel of Goethe, that his poetry is 
inevitable. The measure, the colour, the imaginative 



EMERSON. 27 

figures, are the product of search, not of spontaneous 
movements of sensation and reflection combining in 
a harmony that is delightful to the ear. They are the 
outcome of a discontent with prose, not of that high- 
strung sensibility which compels the true poet into 
verse. This must not be said without exception. The 
Threnody, written after the death of a deeply loved 
child, is a beautiful and impressive lament. Pieces 
like Musquetaquid, the Adirondacs, the Snoivstorm, 
The Humble-Bee, are pretty and pleasant bits of pastoral. 
In all we feel the pure breath of nature, and 

The primal mind, 
Tliat flows in streams, that breathes in wind. 

There is a certain charm of naiveU, that recalls the un- 
varnished simplicity of the Italian painters before 
Raphael. But who shall say that he discovers that 
' spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,' which a 
great poet has made the fundamental element of 
poetry 1 There are too few melodious progressions ; 
the melting of the thought -with natural images and 
with human feeling is incomj^lete ; we miss the charm 
of perfect assimilation, fusion, and incorporation ; and 
in the midst of all the vigour and courage of his work, 
Emerson has almost forgotten that it is part of the 
poet's business to give pleasure. It is true that 
pleasure is sometimes undoubtedly to be had from 
verse that is not above mediocrity, and Wordsworth 
once designed to write an essay examining why bad 
poetry pleases. Poetiy that pleases may be bad, but 
it is equally true that no poetry which fails to please 



28 EMERSON. 

can be really good. Some one says that gems of ex- 
pression make Emerson's essays oracular and his verse 
prophetic. But, to borrow Horace's well-known phrase, 
'tis not enough that poems should be sublime ; dulcia 
sunto, — they must be touching and sympathetic. Only 
a bold critic will say that this is a mark of Emerson's 
poems. They are too naked, imrelated, and cosmic ; 
too little clad with the vesture of human associations. 
Light and shade do not alternate in winning and 
rich relief, and as Carlyle found it, the radiance is 
' thin piercing,' leaving none of the sweet and dim 
recesses so dear to the lover of nature. We may, 
however, well be content to leave a man of Emer- 
son's calibre to choose his own exercises. It is best 
to suppose that he knew what he was about when 
he wandered into the fairyland of verse, and that in 
such moments he found nothing better to his hand. 
Yet if we are bidden to place him among the poets, 
it is enough to open Keats at the Ode to a Nightingale, 
or Shelley at The Cloud, the Skylark, or the Sensitive 
Flmit, or Wordsworth at Tintern Alley, or Goethe at 
Das Gottliche, or Victor Hugo in the Contemplations. 
Then in spite of occasional formality of rhythm and 
artifice in ornament, we cannot choose but perceive 
how tuneful is their music, how opulent the resources 
of their imagination, how various, subtle, and pene- 
trating their affinity for the fortunes and sympathies 
of men, and next how modest a portion of all these 
rare and exquisite qualifications reveals itself in the 
verse of Emerson. 



EMERSON. 29 

III. 

Few minds of the first order that have busied them- 
selves in contemplating the march of human fortunes, 
have marched forward in a straight line of philosophic 
speculation unbroken to the end. Like Burke, like 
Coleridge, like Wordsworth, at a given point they have 
/a return upon themselves. Having mastered the 
truths of one side, their eyes open to what is true on 
the other ; the work of revolution finished or begun, 
they experience fatigue and reaction. In Hawthorne's 
romance, after Miles Coverdale had passed his spring 
and summer among the Utopians of Blithedale, he felt 
that the time had come when he must for sheer 
sanity's sake go and hold a little talk with the Con- 
servatives, the merchants, the politicians, ' and all 
those respectable old blockheads, Avho still in this 
intangibility and mistiness of affairs kept a death-grip 
on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue 
since yesterday morning.' ' No sagacious man,' says 
Hawthorne, ' mil long retain his sagacity if he lives 
exclusively among reformers and progressive people, 
without periodically returning into the settled system 
of things, to correct himself by a new observation from 
that old stand-point.' Yet good men rightly hoped 
that ' out of the very thoughts that were wildest and 
most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm, 
and pure, and that should incarnate itself with the 
substance of a noble and happy life. ' Now that we 
are able to look back on the crisis of the times that 
Hawthorn describes, Ave perceive that it was as he 



30 EMEKSON. 

expected, and that iu the person of Emerson the fer- 
ment and dissolvency of thought worked itself out in 
a strain of wisdom of the highest and purest. 

In 1842 Emerson told Carlyle, in vindication of 
the Dial and its transcendentalisms, that if the direc- 
tion of their speculations was as deplorable as Carlyle 
declared, it was yet a remarkable fact for history that 
all the bright young men and young women in New 
England, ' quite ignorant of each other, take the world 
so, and come and make confession to fathers and 
mothers — the boys, that they do not wish to go into 
trade ; the girls, that they do not like morning calls 
and evening parties. They are all religious, but hate 
the churches; they reject all the ways of living of 
other men, l)ut have none to offer in their stead.' 

It is worth while to transcribe from the Dial itself 
the scene at one of the many Bostonian Conventions of 
that date — the Friends of Universar Progress, in 1840 : 
— 'The composition of the Assembly was rich and 
various. The singularity and latitude of the summons 
drew together, from all parts of New England, and 
also from the Middle States, men of every shade of 
opinion, from the straightest orthodoxy to the wildest 
heresy, and many persons whose church was a church 
of one member only. A great variety of dialect and 
of costume was noticed ; a great deal of confusion, 
eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and 
enthusiasm. If the Assembly was disorderly, it was 
picturesque. Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, 
Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Ag- 
rarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, 



EMERSON. 31 

Calvinists, Unitarians, and philosophers, all came 
successively to the top, and seized their moment, if 
not their Jiour, wherein to chide or pray or preach or 
protest. The faces were a study. The most daring 
innovators, and the champions-until-death of the old 
cause, sat side by side. The still living merit of the 
oldest New England families, glowing yet after several 
generations, encountered the founders of families, 
fresh merit emerging and expanding the brows to a 
new breadth, and lighting a clownish face with sacred 
fire. The Assembly was characterised by the pre- 
dominance of a certain plain sylvan strength and 
earnestness ' (Dia/, iii. 101). 

If the shade of Bossuet could have looked down 
upon the scene, he would have found fresh material 
for the sarcasms which a hundred and fifty years be- 
fore he had lavished on the Variations of the Pro- 
testant Churches. Yet this curious movement, bleak 
and squalid as it may seem to men nurtured in the 
venerable decorum of ecclesiastical tradition, was at 
bottom identical with the yearning for stronger 
spiritual emotions, and the cravings of religious zeal, 
that had in older times filled monasteries, manned 
the great orders, and sent wave upon wave of pilgrims 
and crusaders to holy places. ' It is really amazing,' 
as was said by Franklin or somebody else of his fashion 
of utilitarianism, ' that one of the passions which it is 
hardest to develop in man is the passion for his own 
material comfort and temporal well-being.' 

Emerson has put on record this mental intoxication 
of the progressive people around him, with a pungency 
c 



32 EMERSON. 

that might satisfy the PhiHstines themselves.^ From 
1820 to 1844, he said, New England witnessed a 
general criticism and attack on institutions, and in all 
practical activities a gradual withdrawal of tender 
consciences from the social organisations. Calvinists 
and Quakers began to sjDlit into old school and new 
school. Goethe and the Germans became known. 
Swedenborg, in spite of his taint of craziness, by the 
mere prodigy of his speculations, began ' to spread him- 
self into the minds of thousands' — including in no 
unimportant degree the mind of Emerson himself.^ 
Literary criticism counted for something in the uni- 
versal thaw, and even the genial humanity of Dickens 
helped to break up the indurations of old theology. 
Most powerful of all was the indirect influence of 
science. Geology disclosed law in an unsuspected 
region, and astronomy caused men to apprehend that 
' as the earth is not the centre of the Universe, so it 
is not the special scene or stage on which the drama 
of divine justice is played before the assembled angels 
of heaven.' 

A temper of scrutiny and dissent broke out in 
every direction. In almost every relation men and 
women asked themselves by what right Conformity 
levied its tax, and whether they were not false to their 
own consciences in paying it. ' What a fertility of 
projects for the salvation of the world ! One apostle 

1 New England Reformers: Essays, ii. 511-19. 

" The Swcdenborgians — ' a sect wliicli, I think, must contri- 
bute more than all other sects to the new faith, which must 
come out of all.'— To Carhjle, 1834. 



EMERSON. 33 

thought that all men should go to farming ; and an- 
other thought that no man should buy or sell — that 
use of money was the cardinal evil ; another thought 
the mischief was in our diet — that we eat and 
drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and 
were foes to the death to fermentation. Others at- 
tacked the system of agriculture, the use of animal 
manures in farming, and the tyranny of man over 
brute instinct. These abuses polluted his food. The 
ox must be taken from the plough, and the horse from 
the cart; the hundred acres of the farm must be 
spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats and 
locomotives will not carry him. . . , Others assailed par- 
ticular vocations. . . . Others attacked the institution 
of marriage as the fountain of social evils. . . . Who 
gave me the money with which I bought my coat 1 Why 
should professional labour and that of the counting- 
house be paid so disproportionately to the labour of 
the porter and the woodsawer ? Am I not too pro- 
tected a person 1 Is there not a wide disparity 
between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor 
brother, my poor sister 1 ' 

One of Emerson's glories is, that while wise enough 
to discern the peril and folly of these excesses, he was 
under no temptation to fall back. It was giddy 
work, but he kept his eye on the fixed stars. Cer- 
tainly Emerson was not assailed by the stress of mighty 
and violent events, as Burke and Wordsworth were in 
some sense turned into reactionaries by the calamities 
of revolution in France. The ' distemper of enthusi- 
asm,' as Shaftesbury would have called it, took a mild 



34 EMEESON. 

and harmless form in New England : there the work 
in hand was not the break-up of a social system, but 
only the mental evolution of new ideals, the struggle 
of an ethical revival, and the satisfaction of a livelier 
spirit of scruple. In face of all delirations, Emerson 
kept on his way of radiant sanity and perfect jjoise. 
Do not, he warned his enthusiasts, expend all energy 
on some accidental evil, and so lose sanity and power 
of benefit. ' It is of little moment that one or two or 
twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but of much 
that the man be in his senses. Society gains nothing 
whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to 
renovate things ar"Ound him ; he has become tediously 
good in some particular, but negligent or narrow in 
the rest, and hypocrisy and vanity are often the dis- 
gusting result. It is handsomer to remain in the 
establishment, better than the establishment, and 
conduct that in the best manner, than to make a 
sally against evil by some single improvement, with- 
out supporting it by a total regeneration.' 

Emerson, then, is one of the few moral reformers 
whose mission lay in calming men rather than in rous- 
ing them, and in the inculcation of serenity rather than 
in the spread of excitement. Though he had been 
ardent in protest against the life conventional, as soon 
as the protest ran off into extravagance, instead of either 
following or withstanding it with rueful petulancies, 
he delicately and successfully turned a passing agita- 
tion into an enduring revival. The last password 
given by the dying Antonine to the officer of the 
watch was Acquanimitas. In a brighter, wider, and 



EMERSON. 35 

more living sense than was possible even to the noblest 
in the middle of the second century, this, too, was 
the watchword of the Emersonian teaching. Instead of 
cultivating the tormenting and enfeebling spirit of 
scruple, instead of multiplying precepts, he bade men 
not to crush their souls out under the burden of Duty ; 
they are to remember that a wise life is not wholly 
filled up by commandments to do and to abstain from 
doing. Hence we have in Emerson the teaching of a 
vigorous morality vidthout the formality of dogma and 
the deadly tedium of didactics. If not laughter, of 
which only Shakespeare among the immortals has a 
copious and unfailing spring, there is at least gaiety 
in every piece, and a cordial injunction to men to find 
joy in their existence to the full. Happiness is with 
him an aim that we are at liberty to seek directly and 
without periphrasis. Provided men do not lose their 
balance by immersing themselves in their pleasures, 
they are right, according to Emerson, in pursuing 
them. But joy is no neighbour to artificial ecstasy. 
What Emerson counsels the poet, he intended in its 
own way and degree for all men. The poet's habit 
of living, he says beautifully, should be set on a key so 
low that the commonest influences should delight him. 
' That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems 
to come forth to such from every dry knoll of sere 
grass, from every jDine-stump and half-embedded stone 
on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to 
the poor and hungry, and such as are of simple taste. 
If thou fill thy brain Avith Boston and New York, with 
fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded 



36 EMERSON. 

senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find 
no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the 
pinewoods ' (ii. 328). 

It was perhaps the same necessity of having to 
guide men away from the danger of transcendental 
aberi'ations, while yet holding up lofty ideals of 
conduct, that made Emerson say something about 
many traits of conduct to which the ordinary high- 
flying moralist of the treatise or the pulpit seldom 
deigns to stoop. The essays on Domestic Life, on 
Behaviour, on Manners, are examples of the attention 
that Emerson paid to the right handling of the outer 
conditions of a wise and brave life. With him small 
circumstances are the occasions of great qualities. 
The parlour and the counting-house are as fit scenes 
for fortitude, self-control, considerateness, and vision, 
as the senate or the battlefield. He re-classifies the 
virtues. No modern, for example, has given so 
remarkable a place to Friendship among the sacred 
necessities of well-endowed character. Neither Plato 
nor Cicero, least of all Bacon, has risen to so noble 
and profound a conception of this most strangelj- 
commingled of all human affections. There is no 
modern thinker, again, who makes Beauty — all that 
is gracious, seemly, and becoming — so conspicuous 
and essential a part of life. It would be inexact to 
say that Emerson blended the beautiful with the 
precejits of duty or of prudence into one complex 
sentiment, as the Greeks did, but his theory of excel- 
lence might be better described than any other of 
modern times by the KaXoKayaOca, the virtue of 



EMERSON. 37 

the true gentleman, as set down in Plato and Aris- 
totle. 

So untrue is it that in his quality of Sage 
Emerson always haunted the perilous altitudes of Tran- 
scendentalism, 'seeing nothing under him but the 
everlasting snows of Himalaya, the Earth shrinking 
to a Planet, and the indigo Firmament sowing 
itself with daylight stars.' He never thinks it 
beneath his dignity to touch a point of minor 
morals, or to say a good word for what he somewhere 
calls subterranean prudence. Emerson values mun- 
dane circumspection as highly as Franklin, and gives 
to manners and rules of daily behaviour an importance 
that might have satisfied Chesterfield. In fact, the 
worldly and the selfish are mistaken when they as- 
sume that Common Sense is their special and exclusive 
portion. The small Transcendentalist goes in search 
of truth with the meshes of his net so large that he 
takes no fish. His landscapes are all horizon. It is 
only the great idealists, like Emerson, who take care 
not to miss the real. 

The remedy for the break-down of the old chiu'ches 
would, in the mind of the egotist, have been to found 
a new one. But Emerson knew well before Carlyle 
told him, that ' no truly great man, from Jesus Christ 
downwards, ever founded a sect — I mean wilfully 
intended founding one.' Not only did he establish 
no sect, but he preached a doctrine that was positively 
incompatible with the erection of any sect upon its 
base. His whole hope for the world lies in the in- 
ternal and independent resources of the individual. 



38 EMERSON. 

If mankind is to be raised to a higher plane of happi- 
ness and worth, it can only be by the resolution of 
each to live his own life with fidelity and courage. 
The spectacle of one liberated from the malign ob- 
structions to free human character, is a stronger in- 
centive to others than exhortation, admonition, or 
any sum of philanthropical association. If I, in my 
own person and daily walk, quietly resist heaviness 
of custom, coldness of hope, timidity of faith, then 
without wishing, contriving, or even knowing it, I am 
a light silently drawing as many as have vision and 
are fit to walk in the same path. Whether I do that 
or not, I am at least obeying the highest law of my 
own being. 

In the appeal to the individual to be true to him- 
self, Emerson does not stand apart from other great 
moral reformers. His distinction lies in the peculiar 
direction that he gives to his appeal. All those 
regenerators of the individual, from Rousseau down 
to J. S. Mill, who derived their first principles, whether 
directly or indirectly, from Locke and the philosophy 
of sensation, experience, and acquisition, began opera- 
tions with the will. They laid all their stress on the 
shaping of motives by education, institutions, and 
action, and placed virtue in deliberateness and in exer- 
cise. Emerson, on the contrary, coming from the 
intuitional camp, holds that our moral nature is 
vitiated by any interference of our will. Translated 
into the language of theology, his doctrine makes 
regeneration to be a result of grace, and the guide of 
conscience to be the indwelling light ; though, unlike 



EMEESON. 39 

the theologians, he does not trace either of these 
mysterious gifts to the special choice and intervention 
of a personal Deity. Impulsive and sjiontaneous 
innocence is higher than the strength to conquer 
temptation. The natural motions of the soul are so 
much better than the voluntary ones. ' There is no 
such thing as manufacturing a strong will,' for all 
great force is real and elemental. In all this Emerson 
suffers from the limitations that are inseparable from 
pure spiritualism in all its forms. As if the spiritual 
constitution were ever independent of the material 
organisation bestowed upon the individual at the 
moment when he is conceived, or of the social condi- 
tions that close about him from the instant of his 
birth. The reaction, however, against what was 
superficial in the school of the eighteenth century 
went to its extreme length in Emerson, and blinded 
his eyes to the wisdom, the profundity, and the 
fruitfulness of their leading speculations. It is 
enough for us to note the fact in passing, without 
plunging into contention on the merits. All thoughts 
are always ready, potentially if not actually. Each 
age selects and assimilates the philosophy that is most 
apt for its wants. Institutions needed regeneration 
in France, and so those thinkers came into vogue and 
power who laid most stress on the efficacy of good 
institutions. In Emerson's America, the fortunes of 
the country made external circumstances safe for a 
man, and his chance was assured ; so a philosophy 
was welcomed which turned the individual inwards 
\ipon himself, and taught him to consider his own 



40 EMERSON. 

character and spiritual faculty as something higher 
than anything external could ever be. 

Again to make a use which is not uninstructive of 
the old tongue, Emerson is for faith before works. 
Nature, he says, will not have us fret and fume. She 
does not like our benevolences, our churches, our 
pauper -societies, much better than she likes our 
frauds and wars. They are but so many yokes to the 
neck. Our painful labours are unnecessary and fruit- 
less. A higher law than that of our will regulates 
events. If we look wider, things are all alike : laws 
and creeds and modes of living are a travesty of truth. 
Only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we 
strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience 
Ave become strong. Our real action is in our silent 
moments. Why should we be awed by the name 
of Action 1 'Tis a trick of the senses.^ 

Justification by faith has had a savour of anti- 
nomianism and indifFerency ever since the day when 
Saint Paul so emphatically denied that he made void 
the law through faith, and said of certain calumniators 
that their damnation was just. Emerson was open to 
the same charge, and he knew it. In a passage 
already quoted, Emerson says good-humouredly that 
his wife keeps his philosophy from running to anti- 
nomianism. He could not mistake the tendency of 
saying that, if you look wider, things are all alike, and 
that we are in the grasp of a higher law than our own 
will. On that side he only paints over in rainbow 
colours the grim doctrine which the High Cal- 
^ Essays : Spiritual Laws, etc. 



I 



EMEKSON. 41 

vinist and the Materialistic Necessarian hold in 
common. 

All great minds perceive all things ; the only 
difference lies in the order in which they shall choose 
to place them. Emerson, for good reason of his own, 
dwelt most on fate, character, and the unconscious 
and hidden sources, but he writes many a page of 
vigorous corrective. It is wholesome, he says, to 
man to look not at Fate, but the other way; the 
practical view is the other. As Mill says of his wish 
to disbelieve the doctrine of the formation of character 
by circumstances — 'Remembering the wish of Fox 
respecting the doctrine of resistance to governments, 
that it might never be forgotten by kings nor remem- 
bered by subjects, I said that it would be a blessing 
if the doctrine of necessity could be believed by all 
quoad the characters of others, and disbelieved in 
regard to their own.' So Emerson knew well enough 
that man's consciousness of freedom, action, and 
power over outer circumstances might be left to take 
care of itself, as the practical view generally can. 
The world did not need him to tell it that a man's 
fortunes are a part of his character. His task was 
the more far-reaching one of dra^ving them to recog- 
nise that love is the important thing, not benevolent 
works ; that only impure men consider life as it is 
reflected in events, opinions, and persons ; that they 
fail to see the action until it is done, whereas what is 
far better worth considering is that its moral element 
prae-existed in the actor. 

It would be easy to show that Emerson has not 



42 EMEKSON. 

worked out his answers to these eternal enigmas, for 
ever reproducing themselves iu all ages, in such a 
form as to defy the logician's challenge. He never 
shrinks from inconsistent propositions. He was 
unsystematic on principle. ' He thought that truth 
has so many facets that the best we can do is to 
notice each in turn, Avithout troubling ourselves 
whether they agree.' AVhen we remember the in- 
adequateness of human language, the infirmities of 
our vision, and all the imperfections of mental ap- 
paratus, the wise man will not disdain even partial 
glimpses of a scene too vast and intricate to be 
comprehended in a single map. To complain that 
Emerson is no systematic reasoner is to miss the 
secret of most of those who have given powerful 
impulses to the spiritual ethics of an age. It is 
not a syllogism that turns the heart towards puri- 
fication of life and aim; it is not the logically 
enchained propositions of a sorites, but the flash of 
illumination, the indefinable accent, that attracts 
masses of men to a new teacher and a high doctrine. 
The teasing ergoteur is always right, but he never 
leads nor improves nor inspires. 

Any one can see how this side of the Emersonian 
gospel harmonised with the prepossessions of a new 
democracy. Trust, he said, to leading instincts, 
not to traditional institutions, nor social ordering, nor 
the formulse of books and schools for the formation 
of character; the great force is real and elemental. 
In art, Mr. Ruskin has explained the palpable truth 
that semi-civilised nations can colour better than we 



EMEESON. 43 

do, and that an Indian shawl and China vase are 
inimitable by us. 'It is their glorious ignorance 
of all rules that does it; the pure and true instincts 
have play, and do their work; and the moment we 
begin teaching people any rules about colour, and 
make them do this or that, we crush the in- 
stinct, generally for ever' {Modern Painters, iii. 91). 
Emerson said what comes to the same thing about 
morals. The philosophy of democracy, or the 
government of a great mixed community by itself, 
rests on a similar assumption in politics. The found- 
ations of a self -governed society on a great scale 
are laid in leading instincts. Emerson Avas never 
tired of saying that we are wiser than we know. 
The path of science and of letters is not the way 
to nature. What was done in a remote age by 
men whose names have resounded far, has no deeper 
sense than what you and I do to-day. What food, 
or experience, or succour have Olympiads and Con- 
sulates for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kandka 
in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the 
porter 1 When he is in this vein Emerson often 
approaches curiously near to Eousseau's memorable 
and most potent paradox of 1750, that the sciences 
corrupt manners.^ 

Most men will now agree that when the great 

^ What so good, asks Rousseau, ' as a sweet and precious ig- 
norance, the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, which 
finds all its blessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itself 
its own innocence, and which feels no need of seeking a warped 
and hollow happiness in the opinion of other people as to its 
enlightenment?" 



44 EMERSON. 

fiery trial came, the Emersonian faith and the 
democratic assumption abundantly justified them- 
selves. Even Carlyle wrote to Emerson at last 
(June 4, 1871): 'In my occasional explosions against 
Anarchy, and my inextinguishable hatred of if, I 
privately whisper to myself, "Could any Friedrich 
Wilhelm now, or Friedrich, or most perfect Governor 
you could hope to realise, guide forward what is 
America's essential task at present, faster or more 
comjDletely than ' Anarchic America ' is now doing?" 
Such "Anarchy " has a great deal to say for itself.' 

The traits of comparison between Carlyle and 
Emerson may be regarded as having been pretty 
nearly exhausted for the present, until time has 
changed the point of view. In wit, humour, pathos, 
penetration, j^oetic grandeur, and fervid sublimity of 
imagination, Carlyle is the superior beyond measure. 
But Emerson is as much his superior in that high and 
transparent sanity, which is not further removed from 
midsummer madness than it is from a terrene and 
grovelling mediocrity. This sanity, among other 
things, kept Emerson in line with the ruling tend- 
encies of his age, and his teaching brings all the aid 
that abstract teaching can, towards the solution of 
the moral problems of modern societies. Carlyle chose 
to fling himself headlong and blindfold athwart the 
great currents of things, against all the forces and 
elements that are pushing modern societies forward. 
Beginning in his earlier work with the same faith 
as Emerson in leading instincts, he came to dream 
that the only leading instinct worth thinking about 



EMERSON. 45 

is that of self-will, mastery, force, and violent strength. 
Emerson was for basing the health of a modern com- 
monwealth on the only real strength, and the only; 
kind of force that can be relied upon, namely, the hon- 
est, manly, simple, and emancipated character of the' 
citizen. This gives to his doctrine a hold and a prize 
on the woi'k of the day, and makes him our helper. 
Carlyle's perverse reaction had wrecked and stranded 
him when the world came to ask him for direction. 
In spite of his resplendent genius, he had no direction 
to give, and was only able in vague and turbid 
torrents of words to hide a shallow and obsolete 
lesson. His confession to Emerson, quoted above, 
looks as if at last he had found this out for himself. 

If Emerson stood thus well towards the social and 
political drift of events, his teaching was no less har- 
moniously related to the new and most memorable drift 
of science which set in by his side. It is a misconcep- 
tion to pretend that he was a precursor of the 
Darwinian theory. Evolution, as a possible explana- 
tion of the ordering of the universe, is a great deal 
older than either Emerson or Darwin. What Darwin 
did was to work out in detail and with masses of 
minute evidence a definite hypothesis of the specific 
conditions under which new forms are evolved. 
Emerson, of course, had no definite hypothesis of this 
sort, nor did he possess any of the knowledge necessary 
to give it value. But it was his good fortune that 
some of his strongest propositions harmonise with the 
scientific theory of the survival of the fittest in the 
struggle for material existence. He connects his ex- 



46 EMERSON. 

hortationto self-reliance mth the law working in nature 
for conservation and growth,- — to wit that ' Power is 
in nature the essential measure of right,' and that 
' Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom 
which cannot help itself.' The same strain is con- 
stantly audible. Nature on every side, within us 
and without, is for ever throwing out new forms 
and fresh varieties of living and thinking. To her 
experiments in every region there is no end. Those 
succeed which prove to have the best adaptation to 
the conditions. Let, therefore, neither society nor 
the individual check experiment, originality, and 
infinite variation. Such language, we may see, fits 
in equally well with democracy in politics and with 
evolution in science. If, moreover, modern science 
gives more prominence to one concei^tion than 
another, it is to that of the natural universe of force 
and energy, as One and a Whole. This too is the 
great central idea with Emerson, repeated a thousand 
times in prose and in verse, and lying at the very 
heart of his philosophy. Newton's saying that ' the 
world was made at one cast ' delights him. ' The 
secret of the world is that its energies are soUdaires.' 
Nature 'publishes itself in creatures, reaching fi'om 
particles and spicula, through transformation on trans- 
formation to the highest symmetries. A little heat, 
that is, a little motion, is all that differences the bald 
dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth 
from the prolific tropical climates.' Not only, as 
Professor Tyndall says, is Emerson's religious sense 
entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science ; 



EMERSOX. . 47 

all such discoveries he comprehends and assimilates, 
* By Emerson scientific conceptions are continually 
transmuted into the finer forms and warmer lines of 
an ideal world.' 

That these transmutations are often carried by 
Emerson to the extent of vain and empty self-mysti- 
fications is hard to deny, even for those who have 
most sympathy with the general scope of his teaching. 
There are pages that to the present writer, at least, 
after reasonably diligent meditation, remain mere abra- 
cadabra, incomprehensible and worthless. For much 
of this in Emerson, the influence of Plato is mainly re- 
sponsible, and it may be noted in passing that his 
account of Plato {Representative Men) is one of his most 
unsatisfactory performances. 'The title of Platonist,' 
says Mill, 'belongs by far better right to those who have 
been nourished in, and have endeavoured to practise 
Plato's mode of investigation, than to those who are 
distinguished only by the adoption of certain dog- 
matical conclusions, drawn mostly from the least 
intelligible of his works.' Nothing is gained by 
concealing that not every part of Emerson's work 
will stand the test of the Elenchus, nor bear reduc- 
tion into honest and intelligible English. 

One remarkable result of Emerson's idealism ought 
not to be passed over. 'The visible becomes the 
Bestial,' said Carlyle, ' when it rests not on the in- 
visible.' To Emerson all rested on the invisible, and 
was summed up in terms of the invisible, and hence 
the Bestial was almost unknown in his philosophic 
scheme. Nay, we may say that some mighty pheno- 
d 



48 EMEESON. 

mena in our universe were kept studiously absent 
from his mind. Here is one of the profoundest 
differences between Emerson and most of those who, 
on as high an altitude, have pondered the same great 
themes, A small trait will serve for illustration. It 
was well known in his household that he could not 
bear to hear of ailments. ' There is one topic,' he 
writes, ' peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to 
all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you 
have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have 
headache, sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I 
beseech you by all angels to hold your peace, and not 
pollute the morning, to which all the housemates 
bring serene and pleasant thoughts, by corruption and 
groans. Come out of the azure. Love the day ' — 
{Conduct of Life, 159). 

If he could not endure these minor perturbations 
of the fair and smiling face of daily life, far less did 
^lie Avillingly think of Death. Of nothing in all the 
wide range of universal topics does Emerson say so 
little as of that which has lain in sombre mystery at 
the very core of most meditations on life, from Job 
and Solon do^vn to Bacon and Montaigne. Except in 
two beautiful poems, already mentioned. Death is 
almost banished from his page. It is not the title or 
the subject of one of his essays, only secondarily even 
of that on Immortality. Love, Friendship, Prudence, 
Heroism, Experience, Manners, Nature, Greatness, 
and a score of other matters — but none to show that 
he ever sat down to gather into separate and concen- 
trated shape his reflections on the terrifying phantom 



EMEESON. 49 

that has haunted the mind of man from the very 
birth of time. 

Pascal bade us imagine a number of men in chains 
and doomed to death ; some of them each day 
butchered in sight of the others ; those who remained 
watching their own lot in that of their fellows, and 
awaiting their turn in anguish and helplessness. Such, 
he cried, is the pitiful and desperate condition of 
man. But nature has other cruelties more stina^insj 
than death. Mill, himself an optimist, yet declares 
the course of natural phenomena to be replete with 
everything which, when committed by human beings 
is most worthy of abhorrence, so that ' one who en- 
deavoured in his actions to imitate the natural course 
of things would be universally seen and acknowledged 
to be the wickedest of men.' To man himself, 
moreover, 'the most criminal actions are not more 
unnatural than most of the virtues.' We need not 
multiply from poets and divines, from moralists and 
sages, these grim pictures. The sombre melancholy, 
the savage moral indignation, the passionate intel- 
lectual scorn, with Avhich life and the universe have 
filled strong souls, some with one emotion and some 
with another, were all to Emerson in his habitual 
thinking unintelligible and remote. He admits, 
indeed, that 'the disease and deformity around us 
certify that infraction of natural, intellectual, and 
moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed 
such compound misery.' The way of Providence, he 
says in another place, is a little rude, through 
earthquakes, fever, the sword of climate, and a 



50 EMEESON. 

thousand other hints of ferocity in the interiors of 
nature. Providence has a wild rough incalculable 
road to its end, and ' it is of no use to try to white- 
wash its huge mixed instrumentalities, or to dress 
up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white 
neckcloth of a student of divinity,' But he only 
drew from the thought of these cruelties of the 
universe the practical moral that ' our culture must 
not omit the arming of the man.' He is born into 
the state of war, and will therefore do well to acquire 
a military attitude of soul. There is perhaps no 
better moral than this of the Stoic, but greater im- 
pressiveness might have marked the lesson, if our 
teacher had been more indulgent to the man's sense 
of tragedy in that vast drama in which he plays his 
piteous part. 

In like manner, Emerson has little to say of that 
horrid burden and impediment on the soul, which the 
churches call Sin, and which, by whatever name we call 
it, is a very real catastrophe in the moral nature of 
man. He had no eye, like Dante's, for the vileness, the 
cruelty, the utter despicableness to which humanity may 
be moulded. If he saw them at all, it was through the 
softening and illusive medium of generalised phrases. 
Nor was he ever shocked and driven into himself by 
' the immoral thoughtlessness ' of men. The courses 
of nature, and the prodigious injustices of man in 
society, affect him Avith neither horror nor awe. He 
will see no monster if he can help it. For the fatal 
Nemesis or terrible Erinnyes, daughters of Erebus 
and Night, Emerson substitutes a fair-weather abstrac- 



EMEESON. 51 

tion named Compensation. One radical tragedy in 
nature he admits— 'the distinction of More and Less.' 
If I am poor in faculty, dim in vision, shut out from 
opportunity, in every sense an outcast from the in- 
heritance of the earth, that seems indeed to be a 
tragedy. ' But see the facts clearly and these moun- 
tainous inequalities vanish. Love reduces them, as 
the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and 
soul of all men being one, this bitterness of His and 
Mine ceases. His is mine.' Surely words, words, 
words ! What can be more idle, when one of the 
world's bitter puzzles is pressed on the teacher, 
than that he should betake himself to an altitude 
whence it is not visible, and then assure us that it 
is not only invisible, but non-existent 1 This is 
not to see the facts clearly, but to pour the fumes 
of obscuration round them. When he comforts 
us by saying 'Love, and you shall be loved,' who 
does not recall cases which make the Jean Valjean of 
Victor Hugo's noble romance not a figment of the 
theatre, but an all too actual type 1 The believer 
who looks to another world to redress the wrongs 
and horrors of this ; the sage who warns us that the 
law of life is resignation, renunciation, and doing- 
without (entlehren sollsf du) — each of these has a 
foothold in common language. But to say that all in- 
fractions of love and equity are speedily punished — 
punished by fear — and then to talk of the perfect com- 
pensation of the universe, is mere playing with words, 
for it does not solve the problem in the terms in which 
men propound it. Emerson, as Ave have said, held 



\ 



52 EMERSON. 

the spiiit of System in aversion as fettering the 
liberal play of thought, just as in morals, with 
greater boldness, he rebelled against a minute and 
cramping interj^retation of Duty. We are not 
sure that his own optimistic doctrine did not play 
him the same tyrannical trick, by sealing his eyes 
to at least one half of the actualities of nature 
and the gruesome possibilities of things. It had no 
unimportant effect on Emerson's thought that he 
//was born in a new world that had cut itself loose 
from old history. The black and devious ways 
through which the race has marched are not real in 
North America, as they are to us in old Europe, who 
live on the very site of secular iniquities, are sur- 
rounded by monuments of historic crime, and find 
present and future entangled, embittered, inextricably 
loaded both in blood and in institutions with desper- 
ate inheritances from the past. 

There are many topics, and those no mean topics, 
on which the best authority is not the moralist by 
profession, as Emerson was, but the man of the world. 
The world hardens, narrows, desiccates common 
natures, but nothing so enriches generous ones. 
For knowledge of the heart of man, we must go to 
those who were closer to the passions and interests 
of actual and varied life than Emerson ever could 
have been — to Horace, Montaigne, La Bruyt;re, Swift, 
Moli^re, even to Pope. If a hostile critic were 
to say that Emerson looked at life too much from the 
outside, as the clergyman is apt to do, we should con- 
demn such a remark as a disparagement, but wo 



EMEESON. 53 

should understand what it is in Emerson that the 
critic means. He has not the temperament of the 
great humourists, under whatever planet they may- 
have been born, jovial, mercurial, or saturnine. Even 
his revolt against formalism is only a new fashion of 
composure, and sometimes comes dangerously near 
to moral dilettantism. The persistent identification 
of everything in nature with everything else some- 
times bewilders, fatigues, and almost afflicts us. 
Though he warns us that our civilisation is not near 
its meridian, but as yet only in the cock-crowing and 
the morning star, still all ages are much alike with 
him : man is always man, ' society never advances,' 
and he does almost as little as Carlyle himself to fire 
men with faith in social progress as the crown of 
wise endeavour. But when all these deductions 
have been made and amply allowed for, Emerson 
remains among the most persuasive and inspiring of 
those who by word and example rebuke our des- 
pondency, purify our sight, awaken us from the 
deadening slumbers of convention and conformity, 
exorcise the pestering imjDS of vanity, and lift men 
up from loAv thoughts and sullen moods of helpless- 
ness and impiety. 

J. M. 

December 24, 1883. 



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